Tuesday's Fortune: 15 May 2012

MEAL:  2 Roast Pork Egg Rolls + 1 small order Sweet & Sour Chicken =  $6.85 + $1.15 tip

Hotcha!  Hank 

USA Sideways Maneuver Aftermath

Here are the Drive-By Truckers, doing a song called "Aftermath USA", which sounds less like an American approximation of the Rolling Stones and more like an approximation of Wilco doing their approximation of The Rolling Stones.

So much white boogie!

Hotcha! Hank

Must Of Got Sideways

The J. Geils Band, Mach III ??? Recorded last year at a House of Blues show in their hometown of Boston...It's good to see 'em back together, blowing faces off...Of course, this Peter Wolf intro thing seen and heard here in all it's manic glory has become a ritual for the faithful. Mick Jagger, where you at?

Hotcha! Hank

Stay Sideways With Me

I haven't fooled around with the list lately, but I'm pretty sure "Stay With Me" still maintains a spot in my top ten favorite songs of all time. That opening guitar riff alone enshrines this song for the ages in the greater Rock pantheon, and then it choogles along for another five minutes as perfectly as any Rock song ever has or ever will.

I believe this song is so fucking good that it embarrassed and pissed off Keith and Mick so much that they pilfered Ron Wood just 3 years later. If the Rolling Stones couldn't even beat the Faces at their own game, might as well nick their guitarist...

I mostly just kidding about that, but just mostly.

Hotcha! Hank

Something 4 The Weekend # 142

Faces: Ooh La La: "Cindy Incidentally" [mp3]

You've never heard this song on Classic Rock Radio™, and you never will, which is certainly a shame. "Stay With Me" is probably the only Faces song you've ever heard anywhere on the FM dial, and that's a shame too, because even though it's one of the finest rock songs ever written, it really ain't enough Faces for the airwaves. For every time "Stay With Me" gets played at 2:13 AM on yr local Classic Rock Radio™ station, you'll hear 19 Rolling Stones songs, including "You Can't Always Get What You Want" twice, and I guess that's my way of saying the Faces were pegged as some sort of second-rate Rolling Stones, which is kinda, sorta true, but that 19:1 ratio is absurd. Unfair. There were plenty of times, when the Faces out-stoned the Stones...

Now, I don't know if "Cindy Incidentally" out-stones the Stones, mostly because I don't think the Rolling Stones were actually capable of this exact kind of smooth swagger...Alot of that has to do with Ian McLagan's piano, no doubt, and yes, Ron Wood's guitar, which would soon after be poached by you know who...

In the end, I'm like 99% of you, of course, and take The Rolling Stones if forced to choose, but that still doesn't mean a song like "Cindy Incidentally" doesn't deserve to shine a bit...Or "Flying"..."Glad And Sorry", "Bad'n'Ruin", "Had Me A Real Good Time", "You're So Rude"...And if that can't happen, how about Classic Rock Radio™ should adjust that Stay With Me Ratio™ to something like 9:1.

I, for one, could live with those odds.

Hotcha! Hank

HOT FIVE: The Rolling Stones

05: Some Girls [1978] Featuring..."Miss You", "Some Girls", "Far Away Eyes", "Before They Make Me Run", "Beast Of Burden", "Shattered"

Well, I love the Some Girls album because it was the first Rolling Stones record I ever bought, and it was a fun and interesting record to buy because they released different versions of the cover art, with different colors in different orders for those four "rows", and depending on the color on the top row, the albums were of varying value on the collectors market...As for the songs themselves, this album found the band confronting Disco and Punk/New Wave straight on, with the slinky "Miss You" at the front (a song that stands up exceeding well), and the pulsing and slightly ragged "Shattered" at the end (which still sounds great as well)...In between, the band returns from the relative dryspell following 1972's high-water mark, Exile On Main St., with a really solid, entertaining set of songs...This was the second album with Ron Wood on guitar, and this is where he really gels with the band as a whole, helping sculpt the third, more polished version of the band that continues to this day...For me, personally, this album still excites me as much as the bands' more iconic and better-regarded recordings...At #5, for better or worse, it pushes Between The Buttons or possibly Aftermath from this list, the two best representations of the Rolling Stones first incarnation with Brian Jones, when they were still mostly just a very good British R'n'B-infused rock band...

04: Beggars Banquet [1968] Featuring..."Sympathy For The Devil", "No Expectations", "Street Fighting Man", "Stray Cat Blues", "Factory Girl"

To Be honest, Beggars Banquet is far from the most solid collection of songs in the Rolling Stones discography, but it makes this list on the strenght of two songs, really..."Sympathy For The Devil" and "Street Fighting Man", two indispensible Stones songs, to be sure...Beyond them, however, is the scrappy and undeniable "Stray Cat Blues", the lovely and plaintive "Factory Girl", and the slightly odd-yet-endearing "Jigsaw Puzzle"...Points must be given for experimentation...In the wake of the previous year's misguided attempt at Psychedelia, Their Satanic Majesties Request, on Beggars Banquet it would seem the Rolling Stones took a step back and assessed their strengths, and found a better way to incorporate new ideas and sounds into their distinct brand of Blues Rock and R'n'B...So the congas and bongos and mellotrons and pedal steel add texture to the songs without overpowering them...This album marks the beginning of the second, and greatest phase of the band's history, and is the last with Brian Jones...From here on in we've got Mick Taylor putting his indelible stamp on what Bob Dylan calls "the greatest Rock band of all time and forever"...I guess if I consider what "Rock'n'Roll" truly is, at it's roots, I'd have to agree. The Stones are the template.

03: Sticky Fingers [1971] Featuring..."Brown Sugar", "Wild Horses", "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'?", "Bitch", "Dead Flowers", "Moonlight Mile"

Sticky Fingers isn't running a distant third, not by a longshot...In fact, there's the thinnest of lines separating the top three Rolling Stones' albums on this blathering list of mine...I mean, there's just a ton of great, even iconic songs, on this album, including my personal favorite of the entire lumpen, the haunting and lovely closer, "Moonlight Mile", which I think is a bit of a lost gem in their catalog...Overall, it's as solid and strong an album as any in their catalog, and perhaps most notable as the first Stones album with Mick Taylor in full effect...

02: Let It Bleed [1969] Featuring..."Gimme Shelter", "Love In Vain", "Live With Me", "Let It Bleed", "Midnight Rambler", "Monkey Man", "You Can't Always Get What You Want"

Let it be known that Let It Be is my favorite Stones' album, though I'm willing to admit it isn't quite their best...But shit, it starts off with "Gimme Shelter" for fucks sake, ends with "You Can't Always Get What You Want", and in between stacks up 9 of the rawest, grimiest blues rock songs in their canon...It boogies plenty, and cries so sweetly at other times, and finds this British band finally figuring out American music, chiefly the Blues and Country, including one of the finest approximations ever of a blues standard by a bunch of white British art-school lads, Robert Johnson's "Love In Vain"...What's perhaps most interesting about Let It Bleed is that there's very little Brian Jones on this album, who only contributed some percussion on two tracks, and very little Mick Taylor, who only shows up playing guitar on two other tracks, making this the most pure Kieth Richards album in the band's catalog...A MUST!

01: Exile On Main St. [1972] Featuring..."Rock This Joint", "Tumbling Dice", "Sweet Virginia", "Sweet Black Angel", "Happy", "All Down The Line", "Stop Breaking Down", "Shine A Light"

In the Rolling Stones' discography, Exile On Main St. is truly Epic...This double, gatefolded LP unfolds regally over 66 minutes, it's 18 songs covering all the usual Rolling Stones bases - Blues, Shuffle, Boogie, Rock, R'n'B, Country - but I think what sets this collection of songs apart from any of their other albums is the laid-back and joyous nature of many of the songs, and the recording itself...Hell, I daresay Exile On Main St. could be called a Gospel album! Of course, it would be a Gospel album fueled on heroin and indescriminate sex in a mansion in the French countryside, but those are God's creations too, if yr inclined to such beliefs..."So come on, come on down, sweet Virginia...C'mon, honeychild, baby you...Come on, come on down, you got it in ya, uh huh...You got to scrape the shit right off yr shoes..." It's just my own observations, but it seems to me that Exile On Main St. isn't nearly the most popular in the Rolling Stones catalog, perhaps because "Tumbling Dice" is the only major hit on the entire album, which is a shame because this is the album on which the band finally perfects their appropriation of all their musical influences, and they do it without really trying and in spite of all sex and drug distractions...In the end, I believe it's the relative "obscurity" of most of these great songs that makes this album still sound the freshest and most exciting today...Try not to sing along...

Hotcha! Hank